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Being left handed its natural for me to sweep the safety on as the gun comes down. This has come from years of doing it this way. It wss mentioned this is day one stuff, if you have been doing it this way since day one I would think it would feel odd not putting it on safe before moving. Military had a bad habit of teaching useless movements , this is probably not one of them.

Last edited by Guns-up.50; 12-08-17 at 10:54.

"Courage is being scared to death ,but saddling up anyways" John wayne

With an AR, maybe a no brainer to put on safe upon on movement. So long as the mechanics of putting on safe doesn't take away from one's situational awareness, control of the weapon and muzzle discipline. ASSuming a high level of shooter situational awareness, etc. Some times it may be better to leave off safe.
- Ex. a legacy m16 with a left side only safety (non-ambi) and a small hand shooter clumsily activating the safety w/ thumb
- legacy MP-5's with craptacular ergonomics
- AK variants

Differences in opinion, on a modern ambi safety equipped AR, will happen on say a reload. I have heard reasonable instructors want to see people attempt to put on safe. This is a reasonable starting point. Personally, I can sense last round recoil, know bolt is to the rear and will not waste time...

In my department I always taught safety on and finger off trigger whenever sights came off target. This burns that "flick safety off" into their minds so they'll never be caught trying to fire with the safety on. Every now and then we'd go down the line and make sure all safeties were on and then we'd know right away who was cheating because - even though they just saw us put their gun on safe - they'd still forget to disengage it. Deactivating the safety has to become part of that ingrained firing ritual.

Safety on for...
-moving
-lowering the weapon to scan
-generally any time I'm not shooting

Safety NOT on for...
-remedial action: the gun is already not firing, wasting the attempt (not necessarily the time) to place the weapon on safe when the trigger is already dead serves no purpose.
-pistol transitions: see above
-reloading: same justification, the gun is already empty and if I'm reloading, its because I'm already in the act of shooting and anticipate doing it ASAP when the supply of ammo is restored. Manipulating the safety adds another needless step in the name of averting a safety issue that doesn't exist if you're manipulating the gun properly.

Now, for times when I'd still use the safety despite the two situations above occurring:
-remedial action turns into a hard malfunction and the hammer becomes cocked at some point enabling the opportunity to engage the safety. This hurts nothing and its value added in the safety department when your tap rack bang turns into a "WTF IS THIS? OMG GET THE GERBER"
-reloading while moving, or a reload during some sort of period in which I'm not anticipating putting rounds on target as soon as I get ammo in the gun. This covers everything from reloading on the move, to 'tac reloads' to admin reloads, whatever you wanna call it.

Last edited by BushmasterFanBoy; 12-29-17 at 22:47.

Aimpoint M4S- Because your next Aimpoint battery hasn't been made yet.